Josephine
Jacobsen didn't just write any old poems; that is, she didn't write
easily readable poems, perhaps because she was aware that poetry's
audience, which could really stand to be more populated, just wasn't.
She once reflected, "Many people who are fully able to enjoy the
subtleties of a short story would nevertheless balk at reading poetry,
and so there's a curious kind of freedom in writing poetry - you don't
expect a wider audi­ence." Her poems are dense, complex, rich, and
rewarding. When you read a Jacobsen poem, you have to think. You have to
make connections. You have to explicate. You have to live within the
poem to understand its deep and often myriad meanings. Yet Jacobsen
could explain simply what infused her poetry: "There is an action and
tension in my poems. Something happens." Something certainly happens in
"The Terrible Naive," the ten­sion-and-action-embodying poem republished
in this issue of WordHouse (see the back cover). "Naive" has
always been one of my favorite Jacobsen poems, one I talked to her about
many times. In 1996, in a Maryland Poetry Review article, I
wrote: "In a brilliant poem that should become an anthem for this age,
in which too many glory in their status as victim, Jacobsen presents a
gem of a reminder to those who would be taken in by such emotional
flamboyance." Save yourself, not them, is Jacobsen's wry and
savvy conclusion. Jacobsen never formally taught or studied poetry.
This most eloquent and complex of poets said, "I don't think you can be
taught to write poetry." As to her writing habits, Jacobsen wrote
everything in longhand but couldn't revise a poem until it had been
typed. Like many of us, she struggled with the piles of work that always
seemed to be facing her and which often kept her from her writing.
Referring to just such organization and disorga­nization, she wrote me
in August 1991 from Whitefield, New Hampshire, "I'm sure that if I were
more efficient I could handle things better, & take refuge in my 83
birthday yesterday," and she went on to marvel "How a couple of poems &
a short new story ever crashed through the cement like weeds, I'll never
know." She never shied away from the truth and was very willing to talk
about things other poets of her stature had difficulty acknowl­edging.
For instance, she and I often talked about the importance for a writer
of a "reputation," something she felt sorry not to have understood and
tried to acquire earlier in her life. And, in November 1991,
know­ing that I wanted to publish some work of hers in Maryland
Poetry Review, she wrote me to discuss a piece she had, which she
thought appropriate. "It is a story of the inevitable gulf that is
clumsi­ly bridged between the process of poetry and the poetry Biz it
inevitably enters later." She was equally exacting about facing personal
truths; in the same letter, she wrote excitedly, "Something absolutely
weird in my own experience has been happening recently-I have been
getting requests for work that I haven't been able to fill. Part of this
is a terrible production record, even for unprolific me, and part a
small wave of interest which would have been pure joy when I was a sprig
of 60, but is somehow a little scary at the moment." Another
time, when she served on a panel judging an important poetry contest
(she read every entry in every contest thoroughly, even when there were
over a hundred submissions), she wrote of the com­promise necessary: "It
is obvious that I am not going to have my first choice-but it has all
been as courteous and formal as a first class duel-and if I don't get
just what I'd like, I'll get what I can honestly live with." Josephine
Jacobsen was a woman to whom true affection for others was a daily
practice. She'd often say to me, as I'm sure she did to countless others
that she'd just have to sing me "a fight song" to get me to get my own
work out into the larger arena. Most importantly, she understood
communication to be an unavoidable responsibility. She once noted of
communication that it "is the single thing we're here to do." A 1987
Baltimore Sun profile contended that her poetry always contained
"the conviction of an ultimate significance to life, of order and
meaning to the universe that is reflected-or ought to be-in the
individ­ual life." By the baby boomers and their chil­dren's
generation, Josephine Jacobsen should be seen as a model of remarkable,
enduring stamina, a trait that writers often have a hard time embodying.
At ten, she first published a poem. At twenty-seven, she was featured in
an Evening Sun article which characterized her as "a lady who
writes as a hobby and who hopes to make that hobby her work." In 1994
on the occasion of Jacobsen's induction as one of 250 members
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Tim Warren writing in
The Sun reminded her of that article and elicited from her the
response, "Why, I don't think even in 1935 that poetry was a
hobby. Even then, it was terribly, terribly important to me." Later
Warren quotes her saying, "It means a great deal to me that the academy,
in its citation, said I've done my best work between the ages of 65
and 85." I have paused often during the writing of this
memoir to read her poems. Each time I do, I sigh; they are so beautiful
and filling; her poems do not leave me hungry or wanting. Now that
Josephine has passed into what she once described as "the flawed dark,"
I hope that she, in addition to her beloved family and friends, has
found lively conversation and a thermos of cold martinis in that
celestial world, and here on earth I wish for this writer of gorgeous,
life-altering poetry, this recipient of the Poetry Society of America's
Shelley Memorial Award for lifelong achieve­ment, a continuing,
ever-increasing, appreciative readership.

Reprinted from an article in
Wordhouse, September 2003 Volume 9 Number 1. Photo by
Barbara Simon courtesy of Maryland State Poetry & Literature Society.